The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (40 page)

Besides being a master stonecutter and painter, Michelangelo was an up-and-coming author. He carved his statue of David whilst waiting for his editor to approve his novel, a thriller called
Chislers in Florence
.

English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) suffered from recurring hallucinations of a deranged gunman stalking him.

French playwright Moliere (1622–1673) was playing the lead role in his play
The Hypochondriac
when he collapsed into fits of coughing and hemorrhaging onstage. He was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis and died hours later, at home.

American playwright Tennessee Williams died when he choked to death on the plastic top of his nasal spray while alone in a hotel room in 1983.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, romantic poet and husband of Mary Shelley, drowned in 1822 while sailing in his schooner,
Don Juan
, during a sudden storm. Days before, he had claimed to have met his doppelganger, who foretold his death. Mary, devastated, snatched her husband's heart from the funeral pyre and kept it for the rest of her life.

THE DEVIL MADE ME WRITE IT

Among the notable literary figures who counted themselves members of the Order of the Golden Dawn are Algernon Blackwood, Bram Stoker, and William Butler Yeats. Yeats's magical name was Daemon est Deus Inversus, which is Latin for “the devil is God backwards.”

BIZARRE LITERARY DEATHS

• Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), author of
  Winesburg, Ohio
  , died from complications from peritonitis, which he contracted after choking on a toothpick.
  
• British writers Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis both died on November 22, 1963, the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination.
  
• German poet Rainer Maria Rilke died of leukemia in 1926. Refusing to acknowledge the nature of his illness, Rilke believed he would die of blood poisoning after being pricked by a rose thorn. He even wrote his epitaph to that effect:
  

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy

of being No-one's sleep
,

under so many lids
.

WHERE'S VOLTAIRE?

Voltaire, author of countless satires—especially concerning the religious sector—was not well liked among people of faith. When he died in 1778, he was denied burial in church ground until 1791, when the abbey in Champagne relented and moved his remains to the Pantheon in Paris. But the late author did not rest in peace there, either. In 1814 a group of right-wing religious extremists broke into the Pantheon, exhumed his remains, and dumped them in a garbage heap somewhere. The heist was not discovered until fifty years later, when authorities found his sarcophagus empty.

THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF BITTER BIERCE